Word: selfing
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...premise of The Well-Dressed Ape is that everybody knows human beings are really animals but nobody cops to it linguistically. Just talking about ourselves the way we talk about animals is a step toward self-knowledge. "We Homo sapiens," Holmes writes, "so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own species to paper." Holmes describes us quite wonderfully, and she's a tireless compiler of biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore...
...change costume with every transformation, which actually detracts from Collette's amazing character shifts--she adopts a new personality just by changing expression--and makes Tara seem like a Tracey Ullman special. Tara has the potential to be a great comedy about identity, but it needs to be less self-conscious about its strangeness...
Roosevelt did more than raise their spirits in his 15-minute Inaugural Address. He told them a story--a morality play, actually--wherein a "generation of self-seekers" on the "mad chase of evanescent profits" had disproved the existence of a benignly self-correcting business cycle. "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization," said F.D.R., whose genius for selecting his enemies would make him as popular as he was polarizing...
...requires “dramatic change from time to time. This is our time. Let us embrace it.” Inauguration slogans have ranged from the promising—Richard Nixon’s “Bring us together again”—to the self-congratulatory—James Madison’s “nobility of the American people” or W’s “Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service.” Obama’s theme, “Renewing America’s Promise...
...difficult economic climate of Harvard today.” Stephen Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology: “Resolutions and commitments of one’s own future behavior are a bit like one person coercing another, except that in this case the present self is trying to coerce the future self. Since Ulysses had his sailors tie him to the mast so he could hear the sirens’ song without steering the ship onto the rocks, people acting in the present have restricted or coerced their future selves for the benefit of those future...